Assistant Professor,
School of Letters
Assistant Professor,
School of Undergraduate Studies
M.Phil English, Jadavpur University, Calcutta 2002.
Dissertation title: The Etruscan Politics of the Hieroglyphic Body: Towards a Mythopeotics of the Postcommunist Subject. Advisor: Prof Santanu Biswas.
AREAS OF TEACHING AND RESEARCH INTEREST
Courses offered
FUNDED PROJECT
2022 marks the sesquicentennial of what can be called the first use of caricature in an Indian daily. Since then, illustrated humour has been a key part of India’s public life - be it cartoons, strips, caricature or graphic storytelling. But its long and rich life has not been substantively archived. This project, under the aegis of AUD, systematically digitized and annotated a part of the vast visual history of illustrated humour in Bengal. Populated with rare images and a substantive overview essay, the website provides a robust insight into the history of caricature and illustrative narrative in Bengal. It can be called a digital archive, a public history resource, and a general corpus on the subject, and is the first of its kind in India. For more information, please see http://humourinbengal.info/
MONOGRAPH
My first monograph Uttam kumar: A Life in Cinema has been published by Bloomsbury Academic in August 2021, bringing together my interest in popular culture, Bengali cinema and star studies. This book-length study on the life, cinema and afterlife of Bengali actor Uttam Kumar is not a biography of a matinee idol. Rather, it is primarily a contextual and intellectual history of Uttam Kumar’s cinema. It is also an exploration and interrogation of the star-persona in reconstituting the bhadrolok Bengali visual cultural world in the post-Partition period. Though the book is aimed as a serious work of cultural history, it is written for a wider readership.
More about the book can be found at
https://www.bloomsbury.com/in/uttam-kumar-9789390358854/
https://sayandeb.in/books/uttam-kumar-a-life-in-cinema/
LECTURES/TALKS:
AWARDS/FELLOWSHIPS
JOURNALS
BOOK CHAPTERS
In Vogue: Lessons from a screen cosmopolitan’, in Visual Entanglements in Bengali film: Landscapes, moments and contemporary motifs; (Ed) Roshni Sengupta. (Forthcoming. Details awaited.)
The Slapstick State: Loss and Recovery of a Political Language in India of the Present’ (with Baidik Bhattacharya) in Walking with the Enemy: Reclaiming the Language of Power and Manipulation in the Post-Truth Era, Ed: Gediminas Gasparavicius, Maia Toteva, Tom Williams. (Forthcoming. Details awaited.)
CULTURAL PRESS / BOOK REVIEW
CULTURAL PRESS / CINEMA (SELECTED)
CULTURAL PRESS/POLITICS (SELECTED)
CULTURAL PRESS/ART (SELECTED)
CULTURAL PRESS/ MOTLEY (SELECTED)
SUMMER SCHOOL/ FD PROGRAMME
THESIS SUPERVISION | MA DISSERTATION